Scotland comment: There are no easy answers to Scotland’s drugs crisis

The causes of the crisis are stitched deep into our national fabric, pieced together by failures of society and governments over many decades, from deindustrialisation to the NHS’s modern funding crunch, augmented by grating poverty within communities that are strangers to hope.

It is a very modern Scottish crisis, and ending it will require modern Scotland itself to change.

All this will need to happen within a society that can appear to view those deaths as distant and inevitable. Nasty things that happen to other people, made worse by drugs barons intent on pushing ever more deadly forms of their wares.

National Records of Scotland data for 2023 has revealed a 12 per cent rise in drugs deaths

Charged with achieving this ambitious goal is an exhausted and serially incapable government now also facing a litany of spending cuts forced upon it by its own waste.

Confronted in 2021 with her government’s dismal record on drugs deaths, former first minister Nicola Sturgeon candidly admitted it had taken its “eye off the ball”.

Significant progress was made the following year but the figures published yesterday suggest ministers have lost some focus on the issue.

The government is, however, trying. It has been right to pilot a safer drug consumption room in Glasgow, pursuing – for years – permission to do so over the objections of the Conservative administration in Westminster, which wanted to pursue a more traditional approach.

Yet this innovation, on a small scale in one place, is not going to solve the problem by itself.

Continuing, targeted efforts to tackle that patchwork quilt of national failings – from a lack of opportunity to poorly-funded healthcare – will have to be dismantled, if Scotland isn't going to go on being Europe's most addicted country. It will take time and money, when both appear in short supply.